Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Sale makes voice heard
When Red Sox needed push, lefty delivered shove
LOS ANGELES — Chris Sale stood in the back of the dugout as the World Series was slipping away and started screaming.
“He’s got two pitches!” the Red Sox ace hollered to his left among a stream of profanities, referring to Dodgers starter Rich Hill.
Then he shouted to his right.
And then straight ahead, pointing with his pitching hand and extending his ring and middle fingers for emphasis.
Sale stepped down, kept on shrieking and raised his right hand, his head bobbing up and down and a fire in his eyes.
“It scared me a little bit,” Rafael Devers said through a translator, “because I had never seen him yell like that, and the words that he was saying, I had never heard that come from him before. But, you know, we came out sluggish and that moment helped us get motivated for the rest of the game.”
The Red Sox had just fallen behind by four runs in the sixth inning Saturday night, nine outs from finding themselves tied 2-2 in a World Series that seemed to be a runaway just 27 hours earlier. The Red Sox had managed just one hit in six innings.
“We felt that we had no energy, actually none whatsoever,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora said. “It had to do with Rich Hill, the way he was throwing the ball.”
Sale did not respond with reassuring words like the ones delivered by David Ortiz in his dugout huddle in St. Louis after the fifth inning of Game 4 five years ago.
This was more like Justin Verlander’s motivational message to the Astros when he popped up the stairs in the very same dugout during Game 2 last October.
“Chris Sale in his leadership kind of in the middle of the game said,H`ey, we’ve got to get it going,’ and the guys responded,” hitting coach Tim Hyers said. “We capitalized and struck quick and struck often at the end.”
The Red Sox rallied on Mitch Moreland’s threerun homer off Ryan Madson
in the seventh and Steve Pearce’s solo shot against Kenley Jansen tied the score in the eighth, both homers coming from pinch hitters.
Brock Holt doubled with one out in the ninth and scored on Devers’ pinch single off Dylan Floro, Pearce hit a three-run double against Kenta Maeda
and Xander Bogaerts’ RBI single built a five-run advantage. With a 9-6 victory, the Red Sox grabbed a 3-1 Series lead and kept rolling toward their fourth title in 15 seasons.
“I was down the tunnel and I heard someone yelling,” Holt later recalled.
Holt turned to Mookie Betts and asked: “Who’s yelling up there?”
“He said, ‘Sale.’ Oh, my God. He was mad at us,” Holt said. “I think that kind of lit a fire under everybody. We didn’t want to see him mad anymore. So we decided to start swinging the bats a little bit.”
Sale had been announced as the Red Sox starter against Clayton Kershaw on Sunday, but manager Alex Cora announced after the game that he was switching to David Price and saving Sale for a possible sixth game at Fenway Park on Tuesday.